Rumors and Innuendo

Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, I grew up in a village, which means I saw a lot of wickedness, but also of the inner workings not just of the human mind, but of human societies. In small model, as it were, it’s more obvious what is going on than in our vast, loosely connected society, and it’s easier to see the workings of rumor better.

The village ran on rumors and whispers. Not all of them malicious, mind. I found myself at the center of several fables which were designed, as far as I could tell, to make life way more interesting for everyone passing them on. Because in the village knowledge was power, and therefore no housewife or cleaning lady would ever admit to not knowing anything.

I must have been a particularly vexing subject, because — it wasn’t even rebellion — I never quite “got” the code of behavior for Portuguese women (at least in the village) on top of not quite acting like a normal human being, in that my body most of the time doesn’t talk to me, and Mr. Hormone couldn’t make his voice heard until well into my twenties, and even then in compartmentalized circumstances. So, for instance, I went around with my ersatz brothers (my brother’s friends, who, when I was three, nationalized me as “the people’s sisters”) without any consciousness that we weren’t in fact genetically related. Because I’d accept rides from them, or sit across them studying at the coffee shop, the village assumed I was a loose woman. But because I never actually became seized with the consequences of such behavior, and because I wore no makeup and lived with my nose in a book, I must be a spinster-in-the-making.

Add to that that I received letters from men abroad. Not just my then-boyfriend, no. Lots of letters with male names. (Most of my friends were always male.) AND that I had friends visit, both male and female and some as old as my dad.

The stories they made up to explain this sometimes made my head spin, but all you really need to know is that Dan is an Italian I married in Germany, and the village is still confused as to why we moved to the US.

Those stories amused me. I would whoop with laughter at the idea that I was actually dating my brother’s best friend and “playing false” my far away boyfriend. And as for the story of Dan’s and mine multi-country romance, it still makes me chuckle.

Not that these rumors weren’t damaging, mind. They would have been lethal if I’d ever intended to marry in the village, or even in Portugal. As is I’m sure if I smiled at a boy twice (A sure sign of interest in village code, but in my case likely to happen because I realized I’d been staring blankly at him while miles away in my mind, and then smiled embarrassedly to cover it up) a delegation of the village matrons descended on his mother who was told I was a loose woman and dangerous and she should not allow such a thing in her family. The only one that came back to me — because the young man in question was a friend with whom I traded books and we were both amused at that being misinterpreted — the delegation not only told his mother of my shameful “history” but also informed her I was an Almeida woman, and therefore if he married me, he’d never be able to call his soul his own. As I was at the time engaged to Dan, I passed this on, and we still joke about it. It amused me because THAT reputation of women in my family was deserved.

However, nota bene that I was considered a “loose woman” while the wildest excitement of my weekends was translating a text between five languages and seeing if it matched at the end, or going out for Chinese food with my brother and sister in law (and yes, usually one of my brother’s friends. Yes, it’s possible my brother was trying really hard at matchmaking, but honestly, that didn’t even occur to me till I was married for fifteen years and also, good Lord, if the man was interested he should have SAID. Because in such signals I need a two-by-four. The first guy to kiss me — at eighteen — was the first who thought to OUTRIGHT ASK me. It’s NOT a coincidence that my marriage came from a over-the-phone courtship, okay?)

It sort of brings to mind another Shakespeare allusion. Something about being as cold as ice and pure as snow. It didn’t matter. I stuck out, and so the village’s fevered imagination circled around me, making up all sorts of crazy things, which mostly amused me, because no I wasn’t interested in marrying in the village. (Honestly, I never thought I would marry at all.)

Some of those rumors, as seen above, while not malicious in themselves, in their crazy effort to make me interesting they posited things that damaged my reputation and prospects. It’s human and unlovely.

But then there were another kind of rumors, and those really stained everyone they touched. They got added to the “just for fun”rumor mill and wildly spun.

I don’t know the ones about me — well, I wouldn’t would I? — but I knew the ones about a friend’s sister, someone who frankly probably never looked at a guy twice in her life. But she was “above the village” in origins and upbringing, and she went away a lot with cars picking her up, and that was enough.

I tamped them on them really hard whenever they cropped up, including when women in my family repeated them. Trust me, there was no possible way anyone would consider these plausible knowing the woman, but the village wasn’t interested in knowing the woman. They were upset because she was “not of them” and the only way they could reach her was to fling mud.

I left the village far behind, both physically and psychologically. My preferred habitat is big cities, not because I’m mad-crazy for many people but because in a large enclave I’m possibly the least interesting thing ever. Also, because there’s anonymity in multitudes. If the next door neighbors never asked my name, they can’t track me down online, much less make up things about me. (Unfortunately my husband talks to neighbors. In our old, solidly blue neighborhood, the neighbors had real trouble reconciling the artsy, vague cat rescuer with “to the right of Lenin” which in their minds meant Hitler. Which meant sometimes they approached me carrying Whole Foods bags as a sort of shield of righteousness, or, while talking to me, would let drop they were for gay marriage or that pot should be legalized with the sort of expression of a two year old saying the F word. And were shocked when I agreed. Let’s say I think it was good for everyone when I moved away. They probably have fewer migraines.) Oh, also I like cities for museums and parks. I’m that curious kind of introvert who NEEDS to see some number of strangers every day. It’s just best for everyone if I don’t actually interact.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I found Science Fiction was the same writ large. Or writ weird.

I should have realized it, because, under traditional publishing, our population was about the size of the village’s, at least if you filtered down to “People who make a living of this, or are serious enough to try to.” We all attended the same cons, (to meet editors), were in the same email lists, and generally rubbed elbows every day.

As in the village, I didn’t really know the vicious rumors about me. But I had a couple of people start conversations with me in the serene belief that I as a) South American b) hated America (no clue why they thought I was here, then) c) had come here because my family was starving to realize that what I call “Narrative A” was in play. Narrative A is the set of assumptions that Americans bring with them whenever they meet someone of Latin ancestry. I first met it when my mother in law on my (civil) wedding day told me I must strive not to be subservient, or Dan would get bored with me. (“Sarah’s too subservient,” said no one, ever. Which told me it was narrative A.)

Then there were crazier, “makes them way more interesting” stories, like the belief that we were in a group marriage with our best friends. Oh, I know why. We were all very comfortable with each other, so we might lean on each other, or put arms over shoulders in public. But …. yeah.

However, I had enough experience in rumor to know there must ALSO be vicious rumors. I went through my first ten years as a published writer watching everything I did and said in public, for fear that I’d give these rumors fodder, particularly as I’d realized some of them were politically based. (And though I AM to the right of Lenin, the opinions they ascribed to me were bizarre. Yes, yes, racist, sexist, homophobic, the last one sending my devoted fans — many of them gay — into whoops of helpless laughter. As for sexist, I don’t like twats of either sex, but I don’t think twatness is a gender per se. It’s just a combination of entitlement, maliciousness and stupidity, and boy, have we seen enough of it.)

After ten years I came out politically and gave up my prospects in the village. Fortunately there is indie, so I really can’t care less what they repeat. Which is good, since, you know, because the things they say are crazier than the bunch of stories dreamed up by hyper-religious village widows and spinsters.

No, seriously. Even they were careful not to accuse me of things that were flatly impossible for me to do, and stupidly unrealistic for me to want to do.

They might have accused my mother of wanting to topple the government and seize power (she would have done it, too, if it weren’t for her tricky heart) but no one would have said that of me, because… how would I do it as a school girl with only a few friends the same age? Now, if I’d had journalists in my pocket and politicians terrified of me, like mom did, that would be plausible. (No, I don’t know how. You’d have to have met mom to know how to achieve that with a fourth grade formal education and no family connections. People say I’m a force of nature. No. Mom IS a force of nature. Probably a tsunami. I’m the very pale reflection.)

But the village widows and spinsters of science fiction are crazy enough to accuse a group of writers, only one of them a bestseller, of wanting to keep “Women and minorities” out of science fiction. Let alone that about half of us are women, and two of us are “minorities” there is the fact none of us are editors and publishers.

Do editors and publishers want to keep women and minorities from writing sf/f? Danged if I know. Back when I cared about things NY publishers said, I was told often enough that women didn’t have the mind to write science fiction, and watched a friend of mine who is a physicist be told the same and also that she has the heart of a fantasy writer. (She swears she’s hidden it, and the jar won’t leak.) And I was told that I must write “authentic” narratives, meaning stories with Portuguese people, because apparently that’s the only story I can tell. (There are Portuguese people in my stories. But I’m not limited by that. Hell, I haven’t been there in 35 years. Except for brief visits. It’s all changed so much I can’t write anything set there. Like I know.) And I heard from friends who tan interestingly that they ALSO were told to write “authentic” — meaning limited and circumscribed — narratives.

So, yeah, there might be someone keeping women and minorities out of science fiction, or at least make us feel uncomfortable, but you know, weirdly they were all on the other camp, and well connected enough to get us slandered in national publications and wikipedia pages.

But us? Okay, let’s think we had a ranging need to do this (and were therefore insane, since, you know, some of us are women and minorities oh, and the majority of writers and publishers are women, so taking them out of sf/f would mean the end of the field) HOW? Being sane it would never occur to us. It would be like me deciding I’m going to change the variety of wheat sown in the US. How?

Now apparently people in this blog hate gypsies and want to commit genocide against them. This is amazingly bizarre. Yes, I know that the idiot Floppy Camel has taken stuff from comments and interpreted it through his looking-glass mind to mean that. Yeah. Well, you know, he’s so invested in disguising his perfectly normal, traditional marriage, because he and his wife have been scamming the community out of “diversity” attention for years, that he can’t possibly be thinking anymore. The migraine of trying to reconcile that nonsense, including, btw, the belief that Dave Freer will cause people to attack them by revealing they’re utterly conventional (and across the world. And annoying/reviling people who have never attacked anyone, ever) probably rotto-rooted what remained of his brain.

BUT the truly bizarre thing is that this has now come to me three times from the left. From what should be normal, sane, rational people on the left. No, seriously. They’ll say something like “Well, I think gypsies shouldn’t be killed!” in that tone of a two year old saying something naughty. And are usually completely confused with my answer that I don’t think any ethnic group should be killed. Just like my former neighbors were by my support for gay marriage.

It’s illustrative of the kind of insanity the left buys into that they would believe we’d actually discuss that, in blog comments, as a part of our plan for… what? world domination? Yes, because a bunch of odds scattered all over the world, most of us in academic and artistic professions are totally going to form a world government. And most of us being in America totally have a say over what Europeans do with their minority populations.

The person who came spinning onto comments here (the village idiot of village idiots, so betwattled as to not even bother getting where the person who started that thread lived or who she is) seemed to think this was our serious plan and was shocked, shocked, after misinterpreting everything we said, that we could talk about genocide.

Because Europe going nuts and killing the strangers in their midst is such a ridiculous idea and hasn’t happened throughout history. And Europe isn’t about to hit the wall with the welfare state and EU and need a scapegoat.

Yeah, we did say gypsies’ behaviors encourage this. But they are their behaviors. Not rumors, but things they are actually proud of. And which, incidentally, mesh very badly with the welfare state.

And no, we’re not being racist. Behavior is not race. If you think it is, Hitler would LOVE you. “Behavior is race” IS the justification for genocide.

The fact that they comb through this blog every day and have to resort to taking comments wildly out of contest and misinterpreted to build their crazy rumors on is telling. As is the fact their minds are apparently virgin of history, sociology and psychology which form the background against which such discussions move. As is the idea that they think we’re “plotting genocide” as though we could, you know, put it in action, because we’re… I don’t know? All powerful? Isn’t it weird that the people who say they can ruin/have ruined our careers also think we run the world? Don’t you think they’d get headaches.

Rumors make no sense, and aren’t supposed to make sense. This doesn’t stop the bitter people with no life from making them up.

I only get upset when people who should know better, some of whom are at least friendly acquaintances start repeating them.

And, of course, when crazy people with axes to grind start spreading them in order to ruin other people’s careers.

There is a reason maligning other people used to be considered a sin.

Unfortunately, like most other sins, starting with envy, in the Marxist heresy rumor mongering is a virtue. How else are you going to gather up all the subversives into the Gulag, unless you listen to the rumor mill and isolate anyone who might, once, have had an unauthorized thought.

If I were still dependent on publishers to get my work out I’d be worried.

As it is, I just laugh, as I leave the village behind.

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497 responses to “Rumors and Innuendo”

I invariably attempt something clever and/or provocative for my enlistment in the day’s discussion but, having a dentist appointment in fifteen minutes this is not such a day. I look eagerly forward to your correspondence and am awa’ to get my head irradiated.

Likewise.
The rumors about my daughter when she was in high school were amusing: mostly Hispanic, South Side, and Catholic – and she was a blond, Protestant Anglo. The hot take among the rest of the student body was that we were fabulously wealthy and also extremely eccentric: yeah, the car that I drove then (an ancient Volvo) was the car that I kept for driving on the South Side, the house that we lived in was just the guest cottage, and though I was (at the time) working in a department store concession, it was the department store where all the rich people shopped, and so all the staff were rich people, too. Just eccentric.
I concluded from this that most people would rather believe in an interesting fantasy…

Courtesy of advise to supply The Daughter with autobiographies given me by one of The Daughter’s teacher’s when we pulled her to home educate I discovered Dr. William R. Maples’ book Dead Men Do Tell Tales. The book is a delightfully readable account of the work of a world premiere forensic anthropologist.

Dr. Maples was asked to consult when the Russians found the graves of the executed Tsar and his family. Among his conclusions, yes, one of the girls is missing, but it was not Anastasia.

For some reason, almost everyone I’ve ever known have (mistakenly) assumed my family has money, and lots of it. (Right. My parents are on year fifteen or sixteen of the total house remodel just because they’re eccentric. Sure, let’s go with that.)

I have no idea why. Even complete strangers have made this conclusion about me. I once ducked into a very fancy clothing boutique in San Francisco because I saw a dress I wanted to try on (and could in no way afford). They practically rolled out the red carpet.

I’ve decided to blame it on the fact that I have resting bitch-face, and so tend to look haughty?

That’s the only bizarre rumor regarding me/my family I’ve ever been aware of, but considering I (and the parents) currently live in a tiny-tiny town, and considering the sort of garbage my younger sister was spreading far and wide in a bid to be seen as a helpless damsel/victim some years back, I rather suspect there are a lot worse stories. But we’re all a bunch of reclusive introverts, so mostly we ignore the town and are in turn ignored.

But we’re all a bunch of reclusive introverts, so mostly we ignore the town and are in turn ignored.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner; you ignore people, ergo you are you snobs, and, therefore, you must be rich. QED.

Y’know, you’re probably right about that. Add in the fact that it’s a town of about 400 people, and the primary pastime is hanging out at the local bar(s), and not only are we reclusive introverts, we also don’t drink alcohol… :p

Greater Metropolitan $SMALL_TOWN might have 400 people in a 10 mile radius. We don’t have a bar, just a bench in front of the local store where the deplorables, drunks and dogs hang out. Here, if you can a) skip going to the local food bank outlet, and b) pay your bills, you’re well off. If you actually give something away, you’re rich. Sigh.

Gossip is wonderful, too. The retired campus policeman and his wife were reported to be a professor and his rich wife. OTOH, she may well have spread that herself. Bless her heart.

OTOH, around here it’s understood that a locked gate implies somebody with a 12 gauge on the other side. The town’s hit the top of the 11PM news more times than it should…

I get something like that sometimes too. I’m not particularly social, and I am shy and rather uncertain when it comes to socializing but I also am sort of a snob – I have always found most people a bit less than impressive, okay, stupid or near there, so I am not impressed by things like clothes or degrees. The shyness comes into picture mostly when I deal with people I’d like to be friends with because they have impressed me in some way, and then I don’t know how to act. But when it is somebody who is merely dressed well or whatever, as said, not that impressed by just that (so they maybe know a lot better than me how to make money, but while that should be respected it still doesn’t mean they are smart in other ways) and I do tend to approach most people as if I was either their equal, or even above them, as I don’t much care what most people think of me (apart from the practical problems it might bring – which means I usually do try to be polite and avoid potentially controversial subjects).

And the end result does seem to be that I am assumed to be somebody who is on at least equal level socially, doesn’t matter what that level is, when it comes to casual meetings with people.

Which has also exposed some rather obvious social bias in some people when I have happened to mention what I do for a living, somebody chats with me friendly enough until she learns I am a blue collar worker, and at the lowest levels with that too, and suddenly I seem to turn invisible to her.

Most of the ones I heard about were someone’s personal rich fantasy life*– there does seem to be at least two levels of it, though, if you’re a bad enough receiver folks start only passing on the rumors they really, really believe. Which tend to be much more seductive, because they actually make sense and worse, they’re sometimes true…. (WTH do you do when you know someone is slowly killing themselves through deliberate stupidity, basically because they’re lonely?)

* Had a chief who seemed to build his life around being a bad stereotype of a sailor, down to the girl in every port part. He was completely sure that our gaming group was really an orgy, and frequently came down to catch us in the act. You could HEAR the trash-talking of the guys playing various fighting games from the top of the stairwell, but he couldn’t believe it.

The only rumor about me that I’m aware of, and it’s not so much a rumor as my anxiety riddled wife misunderstanding and then it going around, is that one of my coworkers and I have been having an affair. We’ve only worked together at two different departments, gone to a bunch of out of town trainings together, and known each other for almost 20 years now. She surprised the heck out of our new dispatchers last year when she walked into dispatch and started rummaging around in my drawer. Neither one of us has time to support another family.

I had a coworker tell me once that another coworker’s marriage was on the rocks because his wife had had an affair. It took me way too long to figure out that she’d misinterpreted a gaming session they’d been discussing. (Thankfully, as I was friends with both, and this was hearsay, I didn’t put my foot in my mouth over that one!)

Lately I’ve taken to using Kurt Schlicter’s formulation when I respond to the SJW (et. al.) crew: I refer to everyone not in their cohort as “normal Americans.” The obvious inference is that they (the SJW etc.) are abnormal or unAmerican, or both. Which is true, of course, but which makes them shriek and foam at the mouth. It’s quite entertaining…

Don’t worry, I’m (and Colonel Kurt, probably) not really concerned about the normality of traditional Americans. It’s just how sputteringly upset they get when you strongly imply that they’re abnormal and/or unAmerican that makes it so much fun!

But they are abnormal. Most people don’t want the endless drama and stress and having to constantly watch themselves and be constantly outraged that comes as part and parcel of being a SJZ. SJZs apparently get off on that sort of thing, which is why they’re constantly looking for the next thing to get upset about, and it’s getting smaller each time.

I’ve said this about the most famous American princess, Barbie, when people tried to normalize her: I’m pretty sure Barbie never tried to be normal! (Unless, maybe, normal for an actress, which she was in that one cartoon movie that my girls have. Being an actress would actually make the most sense; then Barbie could have *played* an astronaut, a flight attendant, etc. Come to think of it, I think that was the one where a rival broke Ken and Barbie up after recording some lines Barbie was rehearsing. I think I miss Barbie; she’s less stressful than animae and my wife could fall asleep to the music better—although “Ladybug and Chat Noir” is kinda fun. What do I know; I thought “Solo” was a pretty good movie.)

Just remember, statistically, normal is not a point, it’s a range between +-1.92 standard deviations from the mean. The mean is a point, the average. And yes, there are average people, just not many of them. Normal people, on the other hand, are as common as dirt, and with as much variety as dirt too.

I didn’t realize that I was the center of the rumor mill in my small community until my sisters told me just before we walked into a small church dance that they didn’t want to be seen with me. I was ruining their chances. I think something clicked in my head and I told them this was the last dance I would be taking them to… ever. Then I proceeded to have a good time.

I’m glad I left that community a few years later and joined the Navy. I was always the odd one out… and I actually met some folks that were in my tribe in the electronics field. I won’t go back.

I’m told there are endless rumors about me here my small town of Hooterville. I’m sufficiently clueless that I’ve never known what any of them are, and I don’t care a damn. It doesn’t even impinge on my consciousness.

Honestly, I don’t even think about the other people who live here, so I can’t imagine them thinking about me. Apparently they do though, and they talk all the time. So weird, right? ~:D

In my experience, the humorless seem to be totally unaware that they have no sense of humor. They seem to think that an insistent earnestness is the standard of human behavior, and get mildly upset to outraged when others don’t take everything as seriously as they do.

I confess to an Odd sense of humor. Larry Correia wondered what he had done to get disinvited from
Origins, tossed communists from helicopters? Much fun was had with the concept. Given the authority of Lenin himself (As Amanda has reminded us) that no good Marxist could oppose throwing capitalists out of helicopters, a little humor at their expense must be a Big Deal.

It’s all I can do at time to not ask $BIG_BOSS2 if the operation was painful… “What operation?” “The one where any sense of humor you might have once had was surgically removed.” Of course, he’d have no sense humor about the query. (Indeed, the time he showed a *hint* of *recognizing* humor [beyond sitcom level needs-laugh track crap] I started looking around for pods.)

I have problems with most humor where the point is embarrassing somebody when the target hasn’t been made into somebody who seems to well deserve it beforehand. Which leaves hell of a lot of humor out for me. Like pretty much all pranks. They mostly just seem mean to me, not funny.

Yeah, the only pranks I can go for are the “startled” sort– like the one for Saint Pat’s where you put a drop or two of green food coloring in the bottom of the beer mugs you keep in the freezer “so you don’t have to chill the beer,” so it pours yellow and then turns green. 🙂

I once pulled off a prank that took several months to come to a conclusion. Basically, after receiving a couple of odd envelopes from someone I knew (“marbles is case you lost yours”), I decided to retaliate—just before Spring Break. I asked people who were traveling away to take my envelopes, with even weirder items, address them, and mail them from where they were going. My friend received envelopes from all over the country, in weird handwriting, with things like car wash tokens in them.

I saw her after school got out and got to see the Moment of Realization. That’s always fun.

Oh! You got your sense of humor from DRMO (Defense Reutilization and Marketing Organization)? My company disposed of a truck there once; it had gone off road and over a hillside when the brakes went out on a four hour road trip. I guess if you had it checked for cracks, it’s probably OK.

Mine was damaged by a fall taken when I was two years old. It left me with a small scar over my right eye which has rendered that eyebrow slightly cocked ever since. As a result I have forever seen the world somewhat out of kilter.

The Chief has a sense of humor– and can tell jokes. (Not yet a year and a half)

He’s got exactly one:
he falls, looks around to make sure everybody is looking at him, and then says in a totally flat voice:
“Ow.”
If the resulting giggles are big enough, he adds a long, drawn out, but still flat, “oooooow” and a huge grin.

In certain paranoid circles, “I was just joking” is viewed as the defense for putting a foot out of line from accepted groupthink, whether it was attacking a politically-supported target, or failing to catch up on the latest topic of five-minute hate and questioning its need.

As well, “humour” is used to rally the troops and identify the latest target of the five-minute-hate. Witness SNL and Colbert being all-anti-Trump, all the time… or even better yet, find the episode they whipped from Comey-bad (for investigating Clinton) to Comey-good (for investigating Trump) so fast the studio audience, who’d been shuttered for several hours away from media sources, gave the wrong reaction when his name was mentioned.

Thus, “joking” is merely code for trying to dodge being stabbed in the back – and they find it very hard to believe that we do not view the world the same way, and actually really were, truly, just joking. And when we are laughing, they’re trying hard to figure out who we’re ginning up hate against – because it’s what they do.

My dad has a story about that sort of joker. Turns out Dad has shinbones of steel, and the joker did not. One broken leg later, the decision was made not to pick on Dad anymore. All Dad did was fall. Back in 194mumble, falling down when tripped was not bad behavior.

Part of the thing about the original cast is that they benefited from being fresh, so that many of their clunkers were accepted as “good efforts.” They were also reasonably balanced in their politics, so that their Ford(Chase)-Carter(Ackroyd) debates were mostly even-handed.

As time went by they lost both qualities, so that many of their jokes were simply obvious hackery targeted to the juvenile.

These aren’t comments. This is a crowded living room filled with people I like. … and some skunks, but mostly people I like, if like is interpreted as “Can be trusted to throw a pie or get up on the table and strip.”

I think any lingering humor is excised when people embrace A Great Cause, no matter which Great Cause they latch on to. Sort of like Khomeni’s line about “There is no joy in Islam,” there is no humor in Social Justice Activism.

Your blog isn’t nominated for a Hugo either, Mr. Chupik sir. An oversight I’m sure, since scraping other people’s comments for a whiff of scandal seems to be the big draw on Hugo nominated blogs these days.

Oh, is that why someone showed up on MGC all spoiling for a fight about Roma? I was wondering where is the world that came from – guess I missed a day in the comments at your blog and the subsequent whipping themselves into a frenzy off somewhere else.

*snort*

This demonstrates, as well, the idiocy of whipping themselves into a frenzy over anything – because give it a few days or a lack of obsessive following due to having a lot going on offline, and their war cry makes no sense. Give it six years, and anyone who finds this in the archives will be saying “Wait, what is this idiocy? Congressional meetings on Tide pod swallowing and accusations of imaginary genocidal impulses at ATH? 2018 was weird…”

Bet certain factions will still be screaming that this immigrant-heavy, non-Americans easily included, people of all orientations and tannitude (including straight and pale!) place is racis’ sexis’ facis’ homophobic, and whatever else they want to tack on by then. Because it’s easier to double down and scream harder than to take a long hard look in the mirror, admit the person staring back is actually the one with the problem, and change.

The poor things are obviously oppressed. Always the cheapest ones in the produce bins – and my store makes that painfully obvious by putting them right next to those high-priced heirloom organic snobs.

(I am obviously also a genocidal lycopersicumist – I must kill a couple hundred of them a month. But what can I say? The family likes Italian food.)

Roma tomatoes always tasted odd to me. Probably because I grew up on home-grown, mostly heritage variety tomatoes (although Dad did sometimes grow some more modern varieties). For some reason we never grew Roma tomatoes. I think my Dad thought they were too small to bother with.

We grow our tomatoes in the greenhouse (we’re zone 1, and have had hard freezes in June). Until last year, we grew Romas (tomatoes! 🙂 ), the aforementioned Siletz, and Siberias. (They apparently originated, in, surprise, Siberia. Go figure.)

Last year we added a mix of heirloom varieties (from Ed Hume seeds), and they gave us some really good tomatoes. So, we’re doing the 4 varieties. Depending on the weather, one variety can do a lot better than the others. Anything we don’t eat during the summer (or give away in a good year–last year really wasn’t) gets dehydrated, and those bits go into the chicken & sauce $SPOUSE makes. I’ll add some to to soup.

There are some fairly big Roma varieties, but we get the smaller ones. Still, lots of flavor.

I live in Florida, which SHOULD be OK for tomatoes, but sadly I have two black thumbs and last time I tried, I actually got maybe 3 edible tomatoes off of four plants. 😦 One of these days, I’m gonna figure out what I’m doing wrong. For now, if I had to grow my own food I would starve.

Interestingly enough, at the same time of my tomato fail, I had some luffa vines that (I thought) did great… until a friend pointed out what I SHOULD have gotten from those vines… Oh well, I enjoyed growing them and got more luffas than I could use. 🙂

The first year I grew tomatoes in San Jose, they did well. The second year, all the gophers in town moved in.

Yet another issue; you can’t grow tomatoes near a walnut tree, or where one had been. The 50 year old tree that had been cut 10 years previously had a large patch of anti-tomato soil. I think it’s the tannin.

We do a boatload of zucchini and tomatoes, and try to give as much as practical to the Gospel Mission in town.

In the Philippines, young luffa fruits are edible; we peel, cut up and boil them with onion, a bit of ginger, salt, pepper to a light, slightly soupy consistency. The older ones are the ones turned into luffa scrubs after they are peeled, de-seeded and boiled in bleach and a slight softening agent of some sort.

We get it sporadically. Two likely causes: 1) the watering cycle is uneven. We had good-ish luck with growing them in 3 and 4 gallon pots if we kept the overflow basin full. (The greenhouse hits 120F daytime, so running out of water can be an issue.)
2) sometimes they need more calcium in the soil, or the pH has prevented the calcium from being available.

Some of the heirloom tomatoes are sensitive to BER, while the Siberias (definately a cool weather tomato, so not-Texas) is slightly sensitive. The Silitz (also cool weather) doesn’t mind at all.

Probably because if you’re buying tomatoes at the store, they aren’t going to taste like much. At any rate, Romas are sauce tomatoes, low-water. I do the U-Pick at a local farm and we make up a bunch of sauce to freeze. (I get the eating tomatoes at the same time, but those don’t keep.)

The folks that want to defend the Roma, Irish Travelers, or any other such “poor souls” usually don’t live near them nor have they experienced their “blessings” in real life.

My wife has had the unique, wonderful, corrosive experience of having them in her extended family and I had my childhood home burgled and vandalized by such. Nothing like having your dog shot and Christmas presents stolen when you are 10 years old to make you want to embrace infinite diversity and lack of morality.

That being said, they aren’t much different from any other group of folks that don’t fit into higher trust societies. But they do much less damage overall than our current misguided and power hungry elite, so they are way down the list of folks one needs to worry about in the long run.

But I find there are always ignorant people supporting various groups and causes that don’t consider the consequences nor do they know history. And the road they are paving leads to greater hell on everyone.

German radio broadcaster Deutschlandfunk Kultur has claimed that the Islamic holy month of Ramadan is not only an “old German custom” but that it had been celebrated in the country longer than Oktoberfest.
In an article, journalist Eren Güvercin claims that Ramadan is a thoroughly German holiday and that there is no question that Islam belongs to Germany.

Güvercin maintains that the practice is older the Oktoberfest, also known in Bavaria as Wiesn. While he provides no evidence for his assertion, the earliest Wiesn celebrations are thought to have been held on 12 October 1810 to celebrate the marriage of Prince Ludwig, later King Ludwig I, and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen.

You people are so resistant to new understandings of History! Your insistence on relying upon demonstrable facts and evidence rather than feels and imaginings just proves what right-wing fascists you are.

Güvercin obviously doesn’t know any German history, regardless of the umlaut in his name. Heck, Easter, as Ostern, was in Germany around the 6th or 7th century if I’m reading it correctly, which seems to predate 1810 by over a thousand years.

Pretty sure that the “someone” was Clamps, which suggests either horrible judgement or really nasty bedfellows on the part of the folks listening to him– the last time he made much of an impact was when he was busy trying to whip up hate mobs with carefully selected comments from other blogs, and that blew up in his face when he tried to sneer down objections.

I really hope that nobody is stupid enough to be using him for a source more than once or twice, although it would explain the whole haunting-the-comment-sections thing.

I started it, I’m afraid, by complaining about the problem of having groups who don’t even try to fit in the larger society, act in ways which make them disliked and so face a big risk in those times when the larger society might go off kilter. Which I think is a current risk in Europe. Pendulum swings. It has gone towards greater and greater tolerance here, but that has been bringing its problems too and often enough when the direction turns – which it sooner or later usually does – there seems to be a pretty big risk it swings right away too far in the other direction.

I don’t like genocides. Much less genocides happening where I live. Perhaps especially the risk of a genocide (or other kinds of victimization – real victimization, not the usual SJW stuff) of groups I don’t much like where I live during my lifetime. Because I very much don’t want to face a situation where I’d probably feel morally obliged to risk my comfort or even skin for a group in which a lot of members seem to see me at most as a potential mark. Or feel guilty for not having done it. I don’t know whether I’d try to do something or not to help them, and frankly, I might just stand by, and I don’t want to find out I’d do that when the sh*t hit the fan because I’d rather think I am somebody who’d at least try to do something. But I don’t know if I would.

So I’d very much like anything which makes those groups becoming victims less likely. Now guilt tripping the majority for racism and oppression and giving that minority group the freedom to do whatever the hell they like even when it’s criminal doesn’t work, but rather makes the hard backlash more likely. But melting pot societies are bit less likely to have anything like genocides – if there aren’t any clearly and undeniably separate groups, especially ones which make it very clear they aim to stay separate and seem to see the host society as enemies and marks to be fleeced it’s a bit harder to create the circumstances needed to turn enough of the others against them to that extent. Can still happen, but less likely at least.

So I like melting pot societies, and was also wondering if there might be any way to push those groups hostile towards the host society and any kind of integration towards integrating.

That led to some black humor.

Which, it seems, some think has to mean I am planning a genocide. Possibly all by my lonesome.

The Nordic country has for decades struggled with how to integrate immigrants, primarily from the Middle East, into its ethnically and religiously homogeneous welfare society.

The new policy, agreed with major opposition parties, will force young children living in “ghettos” – an official term for areas consisting of primarily non-Western immigrants – into 25 hours of public education a week from the age of one.

[SNIP]

If parents fail to enroll their children they could lose their child benefits, the government said.

The amount of non-Western immigrants in the “ghetto” areas was 66.5 percent in 2017, according to the Danish ministry of housing. Non-western immigrants make up 8.7 percent of Denmark’s 5.7 million population.
[END EXCERPT]

When I did it (yes, in Socialist Germany, but later on in France) it was pretty much school – Language, with Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, + bit of Social Studies thrown in (a mix of social roleplay ‘At the Grocery’ or ‘talking to the post office worker’ etc, with ‘generally known history’ and ‘social behavior’, ‘playing at the playground’ and so on.) When we got fluent enough, we were given additional classes with the ‘general populace’ so to speak.

That fills up quite a bit of the day fast, and isn’t as bad as one might think. The problem is, over the years, what had been mandatory (especially as the children were school age and this acculturalization and language skills was considered merely a step towards going to ‘normal school’) became ‘optional’ and that’s where the problems started.

I’d say that the approaches were far more effective when I was taking the classes in Germany, than the ones in France. The German classes had the unspoken expectation that the students would eventually acculturate to mostly German standards, and live more or less as German. The French ones had a slightly …snootier attitude, probably because of how the teachers and staff generally behaved towards the children (as if most of them were giant wastes of time and government money, and then were hostile to anyone who didn’t fit their preconceived notions of ethnic group.)

I will note at this time that the source of Sarah’s discontent -only- gets traffic on Puppy kicking articles. Literally nothing else he does gets any notice at all. The wilder the accusation, the more traffic.

Attention whore. Pure and simple. He’s the pestering little shit in school with the whining voice that just won’t quit. Pick pick pick, day in and day out.

Like that kid, eventually he will put a foot wrong, and his “victim” will lay him out on the playground like a throw rug. How many times have we seen that story play out? Millions.

And on that day, when it inevitably arrives, not a single fuck will be given.

It still is a sin, even if it’s no longer popular to call it such. The Bible is quite explicit about it; in the middle of a passage about people who refuse to recognize the truth about God when it’s staring them in the face, comes this paragraph (emphasis mine):

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:28-31)

A lot of people focus on the part of that chapter that describes sexual sin, but that’s not even close to the main focus of what the apostle Paul is writing about here. His main focus is on behaviors of the heart, and on the depths of evil that the human heart can descend to when it refuses to recognize truth. (“… the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” Romans 1:18, emphasis mine again)

I’ve found that people fall broadly into two categories: those who value and uphold the truth, and who may be mistaken but aren’t trying to lie (either to others or to themselves); and those who don’t value the truth, and thus when they do occasionally say true things, are doing so merely because they see truth as a tool to be manipulated to their ends. The kind of people who fit into the latter category*, in my experience, tend to end up matching the description that Paul gave above: “filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice”. Part of why I hang out here so much is because the regulars here fall into the former category, and I love finding people who value the truth.

* I won’t name anyone whom I think fits this category, because accusations are not the point of this comment. The point is to explain why gossip is a sin, because it unmoors the heart from valuing truth and starts you down a slippery, slippery slope.

In some interpretations. The appendix of Newman’s Apologia — in the second edition, the one collected by him and revised, not the one from the original serial printing — has a lengthy discussion of it.

Am I not blocked from posting here? ‘Cause I was just arguing with Phantom about this at MGC.

I have no particular interest in Finland or the Roma.

My proposals for Mexico and Russia are actually a fair bit more serious. Simply, there’s not enough support to be worth preparing to implement. (It turns out that a lot of the ‘bomb Russia because of the election’ talk is posturing for domestic political ends.) I have genuine hatred for the stoners, even if it has abated some since my life became less horrible. War with Canada? Americans aren’t yet ticked off enough. I’m not ticked off enough. There’s a level of irritation and necessity where these go from an option, to an option whose alternatives are worse.

I’ve no strong feeling about Finland, but I surely loathe the EU. The strongest case that can be made against me on behalf of the Roma is that completely exterminating the population of the EU would mostly overlap with completely exterminating the Roma.

First, they conquer Ottawa. Then they impose terms. Quebec can be its own country or rejoin France. Split Ontario on a line drawn from a point just east of Mattawa, Ontario to a point just south of Britt, Ontario. The rest of the provinces and territories, and the portion of Ontario northwest of the line, can apply for statehood in the US if they wish, be independent, or form a new confederation. And the remainder of Ontario becomes the place the Progressives are exiled to.

Paint a gun on the door? Surrounded by a red circle but not the slash across it? So if somebody asks the resident can claim that he ran out of paint, was actually meaning to paint the “gun-free zone” sign. 🙂

That would be similar to US companies that virtue-signal their anti-gun stance by putting “no guns at our locations” on their web site, but not actually putting up any signs (in states where signs have backing of law), or putting up signs that don’t meet the local legal requirements for size, text, location, etc.

The signs still boil down to “WE DON’T WANT YOUR BUSINESS”, and being an amicable sort, I do my very best to comply.

There’s the issue that per capita Canadians have as many (legal) firearms as the Americans. As well as ammunition to back that up as well. As to the “illegal” ones, well they got misfiled or lost in tragic boating accidents….

Planning Canadian genocide? Why bother? It ain’t as if they’re a threat to us and genocide is a very tedious operation as I understand it. Far better to subvert their culture with ours; so perhaps we ought do something about their “Canadian Content” mania.

No way we should bail out their health care system any more than we already have.

Oh, it’s getting one. BC residents are screaming about the price of gasoline (last I heard about $1.60 CAD/liter). Saskatchewan is refusing to impose one and is fighting the federal government over it. It’s being argued about in the Ontario election currently and a lot of people are pissed about the prices. All provinces that have instituted it are currently run by either Liberals or NDP’s. Left and further left. Currently here in Ontario gasoline is going for between $1.30 to $1.40/liter. (3.85 liters to the imperial gallon)

Yep, anyone with a working brain knew this was a bad idea. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the Leftists are in the majority, and they all turn off their brains in favour of believing whatever they are told by the right “authority”.

Actually you’re right. For some reason when I was dealing with liters to gallons in school I was taught that measurement. Think I know where I went wrong in assumptions. Was dealing with ground school and figure being north of the States that we would need to figure out Canadian to American conversions.

Like how you think but the line is too far north on the west side. Of course, Phantom’s suggestion makes even more sense than yours. I may be leaving a progressive hell hole (Mayor just declared May 28th “Menstrual Hygiene” Day), but once you get into the Muskoka’s it’s pretty conservative. Or parts south of there.

You know, for all that he was a drug user and so forth, Rob Ford -was- the voice of sanity. How scary is that?
Now brother Dougie is riding dearly departed Rob’s coattails to the Premier’s office. He looks like a dumbass, but I’m stuck voting for him because the alternative is Andrea Horwath [spit] and the NDPee.

Do Canadian politicians have some sort of all-inclusive hockey game thing the way some of the USA have such with baseball? If not, perhaps they should. Now as to how the pucks wound up made of C4 or such…

Actually, that’s a better idea. Especially considering the current run of Liberals (leftist moving further to the left of Stalin) stopped the spring bear hunt about ten years ago. We are starting to see encroachments as far south as Lake Ontario now.

There’s been bears seen in Dundas, Mr. Paladin sir. My brother’s cottage is on Georgian Bay, which is not far north at all, and you don’t dare put your garbage out too early in the morning. Brother Bear will be sitting next to the can, waiting for you.

Around here in Hooterville the deer have stopped being picturesque and devolved to bloody nuisance. We encourage the coyotes, they’re the only thing between us and Deerpocalypse.

Just think, Sarah, if the White House Press Secretary credits raising two toddlers to be the best training for handling the press, running this blog means you’re more than qualified to be the Beautiful But Evil Space Empress. 😉

If all of Canada’s provinces and territories were to join the US, the area of the US would nearly more than double, creating a country larger than Russia. Admittedly, the increase in population would only be about ten percent. Less if we exclude the Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver metropolitan areas. We’d probably even let them keep their little maple leafs on their signs. And think of all the customs and border patrol staff that could be removed from the US/Canada border and sent to the border with Mexico.

Ontario has about 12 million people, NYC proper has about 8 million, while the NYC metropolitan area has 20 million. But you’re right in the big picture sense. The only concerns would be, if admitting each province or territory as a state, making sure that the senate balance doesn’t shift left.

Adding Canada as a single state would be like adding another California to the US, in terms of the leftward electoral college impact. Shorn of the Toronto region, or with each province/territory as a state, it would be a different story. Besides, there is much to be said for the approach the Founders and the first generations that followed them tried to take in creating new states of roughly similar sizes.

I’d prefer to add each Canadian Province and Territory as a separate state (although I’d rather combine PEI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into one, I’m sure they’d scream to have their own national level representation), and each Mexican state separately also.

That story about the 2×4 and $DRAFT_ANIMAL? “That’s just to get his attention”… it sounds cruel.. but.. I suspect that’s been me many a time. I think I’ve said it before, but I suspect had some.. shall we say, ‘interested’.. gal one or another tied me to the bed.. I still might not have quite gotten the message until explained. Fully. Forcefully. Repeatedly. And so.. I sometimes wonder, I do.

ESR has described this as (perhaps backwards?) “evaporative cooling”… as the sane(r) ‘evaporate’ away from the premise (e.g. “global warming”) the remaining adherents show themselves as all the crazier and the any *sanity* it might had grows ever colder.

Hrmm.. Maxwell’s Demon.. acting on psyche or such, malevolently.. hrm. There might be a story there, but it’s FAR too close to (passed?) my bedtime to properly sort such out.

Yeah. The village was tiny and BORED. So the rumors were crazy and no one was safe. Bigger villages friends lived in might have rumors if you were REALLY conspicuous, but not otherwise. And cities? Cities are safe. (Hence why I like them.)

Main reason why I am also somewhat fond of cities. Would always prefer to live near the edges, though, with easy access to countryside. The nearby smaller towns might not be too bad either, I grew up in one near Helsinki – half of the people there worked in Helsinki, so spending their days away from the place, so as their workplace gossip included mostly people who were not their neighbors, and half of the time they didn’t even know their neighbors all that well not that bad a place. Well, somewhat worse for the kids as of course WE had to spend all of our time there, but I presume it wasn’t necessarily too bad for adults.

Give everyone a wide-screen television, 500 channels of cable, and cheap electricity; and even the smallest village’s rumor mill will drastically downsize as they become couch potatoes. Seems to me that colonial America, not to mention Dark Ages and earlier Europe, must have been rumor crazy places.

Then there were crazier, “makes them way more interesting” stories, like the belief that we were in a group marriage with our best friends. Oh, I know why. We were all very comfortable with each other, so we might lean on each other, or put arms over shoulders in public.

Argh. I’ve run into this with my best friend. She and I refer to each other as brain twins, and roomed together for awhile, and so on…and people WOULD assume that of course we must be sexually involved. ::eyeroll::

It annoys me that one cannot have a close friendship (with either someone of the same sex or the opposite sex) without everyone and their dog wanting to insert actual sex into the equation. Seriously, people?! There is such a thing as nonsexual love, dammit.

One of the things which pisses me off with a lot of fan fiction, and why I don’t read it much (you can at times run into it even when the story started out looking like it would be clean of any sex scenes or innuendo between characters who are not supposed to be in a sexual relationship as per canon). And the fact that the attitude that love = sex really does have migrated to the society as a whole often enough. Or that any touching always implicates something sexual, as well as any caring.

Yep, sometimes it does so especially when it’s adults with kids, especially not related kids or other situations where the power levels are highly different (like all those actresses vs big time producers or directors in Hollywood etc) of course you need to keep an eye on it, but freaking to the point where nobody dares to touch anybody at all anymore robs us of a lot of good too. Humans unfortunately need to be touched by other humans, and if the only way you can get it is by having sex then more people might end up having sex they actually don’t want all that much, when all they really needed was just to be touched sometimes.

Part of me more than wonders if the plague of pedophilia isn’t down to the attitude of sex being required in any relationship, or–and rather more to the point–that all sex all the time is how things are supposed to be, and the attitude, pushed hardest by those idiots in the 60s and their descendants, that it’s ‘natural.’ (Yeah, here’s the thing: Himself has made it clear over the centuries that natural man = Bad Thing. There’s a reason for those rules…)

Slightly related: I was musing yesterday on the idea of a shotgun wedding, and why the fact that they went away is, on the whole, a bad thing. Because they made it clear to the young people involved that sex did NOT come without consequences, and if you did it, then you had to pay the price and make the best of it. While I am sure there were plenty of unhappy marriages resulting from such, the other side of the coin is that in a culture where divorce wasn’t really an option, a lot of people simply figured out how to get along. I’m pretty sure the idea of romantic love (or, more crudely, sexual attraction) being the major component in a marriage has also done a great disservice to modern relationships…

(Birth control, on the other hand, is indeed a wonderful thing for many reasons. But it doesn’t change the fact that, even when children don’t happen, sex still has consequences, good and bad.)

Shotgun weddings gave young maidens a credible excuse for declining to participate in various congressional acts with otherwise attractive young men, and encouraged young men to be restrained in issuance of such invitations.

There’s something to be said for requiring a young man, and a couple of buddies, to go on a raid of another village to steal a woman to be his wife from them. Bride price works too (task, money, or trade); with less combativeness between the families. High risk generally equates to high value; and most people take good care of their high value ‘possessions’. You want my daughter in marriage? Bring me a Silmaril!

Well, it’s pretty simple. A mill which makes money, salt and grain – or just generic riches – out of nothing. It is described looking different in different poems, and what comes out of it also somewhat different, but it’s always the source of riches. One theory connects it to the world pole, on which the sky was said to turn in some of the old poems – so it was maybe thought that the land and the sky were also something like a mill – and one name for it is “kirjokansi” which translates as something like dappled lid, and has at least at times been used for the sky, the image is that of a cover for some sort of container which has many colors on it, or possibly looks like the night sky with its stars and maybe northern lights.

Magic. You got it and you got everything you could want and became rich and powerful.

And the MacGuffin in the poems. It doesn’t matter that much what it was, what matters is what the characters do to get it and keep it. In the end they break it while fighting for it.

Pretty much, in the end, yes. That is rather typical for all the old stories from this part of the world. The characters win and lose and win, but everybody fails in the end. You don’t even get those heroic final fights when the hero dies gloriously, they just lose, kill themselves or walk away from the world in a sulk.

Fairytales have better endings, but the epic poems, when ones which tell how the hero ended exist, don’t.

Who knows, maybe it is because the people who made them lived under the yoke of other people. Finns lost to the Vikings in the end, and lived under Swedish kings for centuries. And then under Russian rule for a century. And those were the times when the poems got their final forms.

The concept of being ‘valued’ and ‘cherished’ is what’s important here, as well as ‘worked for it’ – which are the values that have been made lesser and lesser by general society thanks to liberalism = libertine.

Yet the desire to be cherished, valued and desired doesn’t go away. The simple fact that Harlequin Romance novels still exist and have consistent readers show that. (And a lot of the plots are very much not politically correct.)

Are there ANY romance novels where she is the dominant type and he a more submissive and retiring one? Okay, has to be some, there is probably nothing which would not have become at least a few stories, but it most certainly is not the common one. Not that many soy boys in romance, and while there now are more boss ladies it tends to be the story of how they finally meet their match, or the one man who is more of an alpha than she is, it’s Hippolyta and Heracles when it isn’t Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast or any other story where she needs more protection from him.

Most of them have the domineering alpha male; especially in Western romances. I see the ‘gentle, but manly’ type of male in Japanese romance and erotica more. (The one that springs to mind off of the top of my head, Erotic Fairy Tales has a short where the guy who ends up with the girl is the only one who is kind to her, the town prostitute. She is one of those ‘due to circumstances’ types, and isn’t actually mean or evil, just a bit numbed and cynical. She is driven out of the town, out to the woods, and gives away her few possessions, food and the clothes off her back and expects to die from the cold and exposure. There is a bit of magic involved (I forget exactly the details) but since she’s passed the test, she gets set on her happy ending – the one kind man in the town goes after her, having sold all his belongings and work, so they can start over somewhere else. In terms of personality, the girl is the more dominant and forward, while the guy is gentle, retiring, but steadfast.

I rather like the series – it’s pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, but there’s a bit of romance, and the art is very pretty.

I’m more likely to get non-standard romance in Japanese manga, now that I think about it. Hibi Chouchou, for example, have two very socially awkward protagonists (the guy is ‘strong’ and very self disciplined, but doesn’t know how to get along with most folks, never mind talk to a girl; the girl is the resident beauty but is so shy that most people haven’t ever heard her talk..) It’s a sweet romance overall. Domestic no Kanojo (Domestic Lover) deals with ‘what happens if you have a blended family that had attractions and/or sex before the parents got married’ – though that is the most basic of premise for the story, it gets more into human and interpersonal interactions later on, with very few, if any flat characters (though I will warn that being a sexy romantic comedy, there is sexual innuendo and visual jokes, as well as lots of cleavage and T&A fanservice; though there is quite a bit of fanservice from the guys as well.)

Hmm. I’d have to say that the girls are actually more dominant personalities, than the guy for the most part. (I also like the series because here, the parents are people, with flaws and feelings.)

Interesting. I don’t read much romance, mostly none nowadays although I am quite fond of stories which have a strong romance as the secondary plot, and am only familiar with the western part of the genre.

Yes, the idea that marriage should be ALL about love and just sexual love at that is not the greatest idea ever. My own parents didn’t have a “love” marriage, they got married because both wanted a family of their own and were getting a bit long in the tooth. Well, mother was too old to have more than one child, me (she did get pregnant a second time, but got an abortion because her doctor thought, after she started to have severe problems in the first trimester, that she might not survive the pregnancy – she was about 40 and this was the early 60’s. I am assuming it was quite serious as in the early 60’s it would pretty much had to have been, Finland had pretty strict rules of abortions back then). But at least neither ended up spending the rest of their lives alone (mother did die early and father remarried. Another story. She was not so good to me).

And it seemed to be a pretty good marriage, and my mother also told me that it mostly was, father had some issues, like a drinking problem, like hell of a lot of the veterans who had been in the front lines during the war, but could keep them sort of under control with her help.

So, it should not be all about just sexual attraction. Friendship, willingness to support each other in all ways, economical partnership, parenting. Just the fact that almost everything is easier if you are dealing with them with somebody else, not alone.

I am convinced that a lot of the current issues with the young men in the US who go out and commit acts of violence are due entirely to the “intimacy or emotional connection MUST be sexual” cultural trends. They’re so messed up and isolated by those trends that they reduce everything to sex—and when they don’t get it, they’re lacking connection of any kind. Not healthy for them or for society.

The fall I turned 10 Daddy moved us into center city Philadelphia. I was no longer dependent on the whims of adults; I could walk to museums. (O.K., so I didn’t understand the time requirements and work involved in adult lives.) I didn’t have the money to go in, but I could get there and that meant the world to me. Besides there were plenty of things to seen, such as fountains, statues and the like, without having to pay admission anywhere. You could sit in the park across the street from Independence Hall and just take all of it in. All it took to get to and from Fairmount Park was a longer walk or a couple of bus tokens. I loved that city.

When I first left the city I really missed it. For a long time afterwards I had wanted to go back and settle down there. It was never to be. Now I think I am lucky.

Why?

A couple of decades after I last lived in Philadelphia The Spouse, The Daughter and I were visiting Daddy and his wife. At the time they were living on one of the ‘best’ blocks of one of the ‘best’ streets of private resideces in Philadelphia. We had parked on this street. When unpacking the car The Daughter left her crayon box on the back seat. That evening someone broke into the car. Daddy’s reaction was to shrug and ask, ‘What did you expect?’ We expected that we would find the car as we had left it, windows intact and undisturbed. That would have been the case pretty much anywhere in the city we live in in the Piedmont of NC.

Now the big city still has attractions, and I can visit and enjoy those. I can also do without living with the general acceptance of such crime.

Usually means rural. One, fewer people means fewer thieves to take advantage of the opportunity. Two, farther distance from each other makes it harder to be there to take advantage of the opportunity. Three, awful lot of rural folks have guns and don’t mind getting blood on the car seat.

“Daddy’s reaction was to shrug and ask, ‘What did you expect?’ We expected that we would find the car as we had left it, windows intact and undisturbed. That would have been the case pretty much anywhere in the city we live in in the Piedmont of NC.

Now the big city still has attractions, and I can visit and enjoy those. I can also do without living with the general acceptance of such crime. ”

I know I’m late, but this, RIGHT HERE, is why I take any stories about “declining crime rates” with an ocean of salt. They aren’t declining in the slightest. What’s happening is that in any number of jurisdictions, there’s a vicious cycle of “more crimes from certain groups are ignored / neglected / treated as evidence of raaaaacism, so the media covers it sympathetically for the criminal, so the cops are more reluctant to investigate, so victims are more reluctant to report, so criminals and their friends are more likely to intimidate” and so on, each reinforcing the other.

What we call the Ferguson effect didn’t start with Ferguson: it just made it blatant and put a name on it.

Loved today’s blog. The contrarian in me has led me to now only reading sci fi that is NOT published by the mainstream, as the mainstream has become too “converged” to enjoy. Incidentally, I’m really enjoying “A Few Good Men”.

The local OPP cop shop has a drone. I have seen it once, briefly, when they were playing with it over the neighbor’s house about 1/2 mile away. They don’t do training with it out here in the Great Nothing, or even test fly it. Apparently hawks think drones are tasty treats.

I used to flash Weber Street in Downtown Colorado Springs when I started changing for the night in front of my computer. TECHNICALLY. In fact there were curtains, and no one directly on our level faced my window. But it was fun to tell Dave Freer, “Excuse me a moment, I got to flash Colorado springs.” Which meant I was dressing for the night. Being like you a proponent of the sticks, it amused him.

I live in an established neighborhood, but it’s a fairly nice one. The other day, my neighbor’s son (20-something) said that I was such a dork. In a good way. (I’d offered my neighbor a bough of rosemary because I was hacking back the plant. Far from the weirdest thing I’ve ever offered somebody.)

The sf community includes at least one such person, and that may be the missing piece of the politics here.

Anyway, obviously there is a difference between a culture which includes criminality and racism toward non-members as an important theological and legal point of their beliefs (at least in some groups), and the innate human dignity and individual moral choices of persons born into such a culture.

What is interesting is that people no longer think of anti-Mafia activities as being racist against Italians, because Italian-Americans are successful and integrated into US society. There is a clear distinction between the law-abiding and the culture of violence.

Roma are basically still entwined in the culture, religion, and law that was designed to keep them alive, together, separated from gajo outsiders, and able to treat gajos however they needed to, for survival. It is difficult to say how they will get out of this.

However, the obvious historical fact is that it was progressive reform programs in Europe, that killed Roma, enslaved Roma, forcibly settled Roma on reservations or in prison camps, destroyed Roma wagons, took away their kids, and basically did their best to stomp out language, culture, and people altogether.

So yeah, I’m glad to hear that these SJWs don’t plan to kill all the Roma. (But they might, come the next moral panic.)

A decade or so ago I remember the EU human rights people were caught in a dilemma when two “noble” Roma clans wanted to have the heirs marry and consummate the marriage. The problem being the kids were, IIRC 13 and 11. Which had greater legal weight – Roma custom or laws about statutory rape and age of consent? The Human Rights court sided with the Roma.

And now we have the ‘right’ of Islamic refugees to rape children and women they come across in Europe, because ‘culture and customs’… while not being officially acknowledged, the rapists are not as severely punished as they should be, and in some instances, trying to defend oneself against this can have higher penalties on the person defending themselves or their kin, than the person committing the assault.

Oh and reporting about the sexual grooming gangs is apparently a crime by which people can be thrown into jail now, without trial.

Fundamental to the assumption that non-members of the tribe lack any rights which the tribe’s members are obligated to respect is that those not of the tribe are not fully human. Thus such cultures are racist at their cores and anybody defending their “rights” to maintain such cultural attitudes is defending their right to be racist.

While I respect the right of individuals to be racist (even while I deplore their exercise of that right) I feel no obligation to extend that respect to a culture, as a culture is merely an accretion of ideas and every idea is subject to examination and challenge as being non-beneficial.

While living in Romania, I was warned (both by instructors in the US and later actual Romanians–some of them gypsy by blood) about the Roma (or Tsigan). And encountering them, I came to the conclusion that there were two kinds: those who were genetically Roma, but otherwise normal folks who experienced discrimination because they were somewhat swarthier than the other Romanians (I expect the ones from that one blonde haired/blue eyed tribe had it a bit easier–they just got mistaken for being Hungarians). And then there were the cultural Roma, ie, the gypsies who lived the life.

They were a freaking nightmare, most of them–and that was just from very, very brief interactions (and the one guy I punched, though in fairness to him, he wasn’t the only male of any heritage/cultural persuasion in that country to think grabbing portions of a woman’s anatomy was okay). And I persistently was told that the gypsy mafia was larger, more powerful, and far more dangerous than the Sicilian mafia ever dreamed of being. Frankly, I’d believe that.

No, killing them is of course not okay. But there are damn good reasons the ones who actively pursue the gypsy lifestyle are relegated to the fringes of society.

The Balkans being a great big screwed up example of “why tribalism is actually something we should actively work *against*” to the world, but sadly large chunks of the world aren’t paying attention. Even though the Balkans has been happening for centuries.

That might depend on whether or not they’re child spouses. Supposedly, the Human Rights Commission sided with the Roma on allowing child marriages within their culture, versus upholding laws about age of consent…

We had an influx of Bosnian refugees a few years back. One of the kids in my wife’s class this year was “Bosnian”. Her student teacher this fall was Bosnian. Some of the teachers were complaining about the parents of the Bosnian kid while others were shrugging it off as just a difference of cultures because “They’re Bosnian.” And then the intern spoke up, “They’re not Bosnian. I’m Bosnian. They’re fucking Roma.” Cue awkward silence

Sounds like what happened when someone tried to wax poetic about the wonderful tribal culture to the old Indian lady in my mom’s home town who was born in town because her mother…objected…to the level of maternity care offered by the tribe. (Literally “squat over a hole in the ground and push.” Had an older brother born that way. Her mother chose to be a single mother of two in a lumber town over it, apparently did rather well.)

Or the views of legal immigrants of Mexican ancestry when faced with illegals. 😦

*giggles* I nearly made my husband jump out of his skin when we saw a BP agent that wasn’t “Hispanic*” and I was loopy enough from driving for eight-ten hours that I announced it.

* For a socio-economic history thingie, there is a strong appearance streak, too; the guys who look like re-colored Irish cops with very rare Roman noses, which if I remember right is the traditional “low class” group; neither highly “Spanish” nor still strongly of one tribe. They’re also very strongly represented in the state highway patrol and county cops in our area, and I haven’t seen enough of the actual city police to have a sample. Suggests to me that’s one of the groups who saw a problem when they were growing up–and went to fix it.

Madam I think this applies to much of the tribe of Odds. I certainly know in my own case this had been true throughout my youth. Not getting “signals” was my specialty. The most egregious case was a freshman in college a young lady asked if I might like to go to a movie. I thought this a wonderful idea and mentioned it to some of my dorm mates who invited themselves along. I had not understood this was a personal invitation a “date” as it were. The young lady put up with this oddity and luckily for me she persisted in asking me out. I say luckily as I have now been married to this patient woman for almost 34 years :-).

Clue by four.* Check. First kiss was from a high school senior when I was sophomore in college. I gave her a place to sit down after her friend from back home was, happily, out when she dropped by after auditioning for a music scholarship at local two-year woman’s college, which has since gone four-year and co-ed. We dated kinda sorta (as in I don’t remember exactly); then she moved on to a four year school and kinda disappeared.

*Then again, there’s Harold Coyle’s line in one of his early novels (not *Team Yankee*, later) about a platoon sergeant looking a 2×4 with which to clue in his lieutenant; never considering that said 2LT was female, which the novel noted as not a great triumphant for woman’s rights, but still. All that to say that some things come with age.

I was born and raised in central Toronto, did not experience small town life until I moved to Market town in England after university. I was working from home when I moved there and rumour about me was that I was drug dealer, maybe with ties to IRA, there to set up network to sell cannabis and cocaine in Midlands.

I also remember being loudly yelled at by my ex girlfriend in main square one sunny afternoon and for three months afterwards random people in my local pub would buy me a pint and say it was for best I broke up with that woman.

“Rumors make no sense, and aren’t supposed to make sense. This doesn’t stop the bitter people with no life from making them up.”

Gonna disagree on this. Rumours almost always make sense, just not in the way things normally make sense. Typically they are pretexts to provoke attack on the rumour subject. For example, the Blood Libel of Jews using the blood of Christian babies to make unleavened bread. Utter nonsense, as any even casual familiarity with Jewish dietary laws should reveal a nearly pathological aversion to consuming blood, human or animal. Doesn’t matter, as the purpose of the rumour is to provoke hatred against Jews, to justify any acts of evil against them.

Same with Antifa activists employing that as justification for acting as fascists. Rumours are about creating a narrative that justifies the actions you want to take.

In the village, of course, they are about enforcing social conformity, but that is merely a lesser sub-category of the lynch mob described above.

In WWI, there were rumors of many atrocities perpetuated by German soldiers, including horrible things like making lampshades out of human skins or soap out of human fat. And they were found out to be just that—rumors. So when WWII came around and they were actually perpetrating such horrors, people shrugged and said, “Fool me once…”

Concur – that’s EXACTLY what happened. (I did a long self-directed project in college, doing down to the microfiche readers, and reading every issue of a big regional daily paper. Ten years worth, from 1935 to 1945.) Every time there was a story about, or an editorial touching on German atrocities against civilians, especially against Jews … three or four days later, there would be a spate of letters-to-the-editor, saying basically, “We fell for those lies and wartime propaganda once – not this time.”

Of course, in April and May of 1945, when the Allies began liberating concentration camps, and discovering that what the Nazis had been doing had been in reality even worse than the most dedicated anti-Nazi propagandist could imagine … the shock and horror was pretty epic.

My grandfather (dad’s father) served in WWII. Didn’t hear any war stories from him when he was sober. Dad told me a story he heard from a neighbor that was an army photographer that documented some of the concentration camps. His reaction wasn’t mild at all about what he did at the end of the first day taking pictures. Walked across a muddy field to the nearest farm house. Kicked open the door, threatened the family with his pistol and sat down at the kitchen table with his feet on it and ordered them to lick his boots clean.

Next time you watch The Diary of Anne Frank consider that the film’s director, George Stevens, had been in charge of film crews documenting the Labor camps for the Nuremberg commissions.

Joining the Army Signal Corps, Stevens headed up a combat motion picture unit from 1944 to 1946. In addition to filming the Normandy landings, his unit shot both the liberation of Paris and the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp Dachau, and his unit’s footage was used both as evidence in the Nuremberg trials and in the de-Nazification program after the war.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0828419/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

IMDb declares The Diary of Anne Frank “American cinema’s first movie to deal with the Holocaust.”

That oe is easy, it follows from their “if you are not part of the solution” mentality. Unless you actively work to include Designated Victim Group you must be intent on keeping them suppressed. The possibility you just don’t give a [deleted] about the Identity of a writer is inconceivable to such twits.

They are merely extending the high school attitude that anybody not actively attempting to get people of opposite sex must be homosexual. It is stupid, it is narrow-minded it is the way so many people are.

Yeah, it needs to be noted that “Designated Victim Group” nly means authentic members of that group … which is to say, only the ones that conform to the Progressives’ stereotype about that group’s beliefs and behaviour.

Actively working to include Designated Victim Group but only in the Approved Manner via Approved Doctrine.

And most importantly, never point out that the Approved Manner via the Approved Doctrine is counter productive or inherently racist or sexist. It can’t bear that sort of scrutiny.

Consider “representation” (for a random toxic example) and the result of it. If any given character has to “represent” their entire cohort in fiction it limits that character to “the asian guy” or “Joe is brawny but smart, think Dolf Lungren, and Mike is really intense and clever but insecure, Randy acts laid back to hide the fact that he’s generally on the razor’s edge of fury because he was abused as a child, and Bob is “representing” gay.”

Or try criticizing how concentrating on an author’s plumbing and tannability and almost never mentioning their books sends the wrong message. How is that anything but damaging to an author? It’s rhetorically sticking someone in a sub-group and a sub-group by definition is limited and smaller than the group it’s a sub of.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t… Not taking advantage of a depressed woman who’s been drinking gets you labeled as homosexual, too. Although I found it amusing, not insulting.

Being too picky is just not a good enough excuse these days, for women as well as men, apparently. Ah, well. Got married at 27 and the first child was conceived on the honeymoon (most likely – could just barely have been right after we got back).

The nation was lectured that members of a criminal gang that rapes and murders as policy must only be spoken of kindly because they have a “spark of divinity.”

The unfortunate among us found out that Memorial Day is suspect because it specifically meant to honor the fallen on both sides of the Civil War and it’s somehow super evil to honor confederate soldiers.

Someone on a convention panel specifically aimed at exposing the evil of creating expendable/killable groups in fiction suggested that some individual German soldier in WW2 might have been marginally human and thus caused “harm” to people in the audience.

Floppy let the world know that speaking of the intractability of Roma culture and realities of what integration would entail is planning genocide.

The AYFKM?! years, the time of dented desks, the Age of Adult Infants…

It’s bad because as much as they annoy and depress me at times, the shadow of what may come from their actions is beyond horrible. I mean that in the technical sense. Just because they *believe* that their actions do nothing but good does not mean that evil will not grow stronger for it.

*shakes head*

I only wish that their idiot fantisies would only fall upon their own lives, and that but less lethally than I worry for in my darker moments. Instead, like as not, it will splash over onto the innocent as much as the guilty.

All the more reason for us to do our sacred duty to self and our own, to take care when things are going well as much as when troubles surround us.

I would, personally, wish that these fools would go to the countries they idolize, such as France, or Venezuela, etc, and join those places in their downward spiral instead of insisting that we join them!

Or y’know, hie off to some island and create their own new nation-state of SocJus Ideal, and leave the rest of us alone.

A fellow can dream, right? But they see themselves as the natives, in their own twisted version of history, and us the feral interlopers. I know. Crazy. They want to bring Venezuela and France here, instead of them going there. America is wonderful! Except for those hatey racists, sexists, and naughty unProgressive bits.

And to bring a little honest purpose and wisdom to their lives, ah, now that’s a thing. A very hard thing. It’d be like to kill them, or they might wish it did for a time. They’ve been betrayed by those they follow, little do they know it. Stolen futures. Happiness tossed aside in favor of a thousand little hates. How can you be happy when you’ve got privilege, or you’ve been terribly discriminated against (or so they tell you)?

It’s hard to see how the contentment of loving family can exist when all men are rapists (fathers, brothers, sons…). Or the joy of children when you are told that motherhood is a tool of the patriarchy. Things that have brought human beings joy for as long as humans have ever been. I don’t hate them, not particularly. They’re really just pitiful, the ones (the majority, that is) that aren’t deliberately wicked.

As I’ve noted before, they are the thieves of joy and the thing is, because they steal the joy from their own existence, they cannot, absolutely cannot bear the sight of other people being happy – so to make sure that nobody is any happier than they are, social justice zealots ensure that those people miserable too.

It’s a pathetic way to live, but because its’ the only way they can live, they must pretend to everyone, even themselves, that their behaviour is healthy, good, and the way everyone should live.

It isn’t. It’s full of spite, rage, jealousy and anger, and the worst of it is, they put themselves into those mental cages, threw the keys away and then howl at the people outside those cages for not being in there with them.

And it really, really pisses off the envious when the object of their envy is oblivious to it. Cue more poisonous rage.

It’s just … to me it’s such a huge waste of time. I can do “Oo, I’d like that too” but not be consumed by that wanting. I see the thing I want as a goal to work toward. The envious want to destroy the thing that is coveted, ‘so nobody can have it if I cannot.’

I’m not really sure where people get the idea that the tropics = ENDLESS PARADISE. Since I come from the tropics, to me the tropics = ‘lots of mosquitoes, flies, heat will spoil food quickly, sure it’s warm all year round, but there are typhoons as well, and oh hey, diseases, venomous reptiles, and boiling alive in the jungle.’ (See: Manhunt: Philippines episode commentary. I laugh like crazy about this because that’s pretty accurate.)

I’ve claimed that the universe is not a simulation so much as an animated cartoon. Then, I’ve also claimed it’s a Frustration Generator. And even that it this is indeed Hell and people are cursed with the horrific ability to imagine even worse. Right now I wonder if this universe thingie is being used as a Stupidity or Insanity Generator and being pushed to ever greater levels to see how far it can go before something critical snap and Things Happen. I get the idea it’s best not to be close to whatever snaps and the further from Things Happening the better off one is apt to be. This, of course, means that there will most likely be an odd (Odd?) concentrate of the Sane at or near Point Zero.

Those that didn’t point out that if the behavior of Mara Salvatrucha is not that of animals, then it is acceptable for humans to behave that way. If it is acceptable for humans to behave that way, why can’t we simply behave that way towards the illegals?

That occasionally shuts them up. For a short while. I’m still waiting for the moron to reply who told me I couldn’t criticize the ChiCom “one child” policy because I hadn’t visited their country, seen their problems. Told her that apparently I am also unqualified to criticize the Klan for fitting Blacks with hemp neckties, because I hadn’t walked a mile in their shoes, either.

BTW and speaking of people who think that “the owner is not using that at this very moment and therefore the concept of property is theft and that means that I’m extra super moral for claiming its use”…

I’m that curious kind of introvert who NEEDS to see some number of strangers every day. It’s just best for everyone if I don’t actually interact.

The kind of person who needs people to show that she doesn’t need people.

Yes, it’s another Thing My Mom Said.

Oddly enough, it was not a criticism, it was half warning and half complement; the warning was to me, to make sure I didn’t actually lock myself up in a room and then not be able to figure out why I was going nuts, and the complement was…well, when you don’t need people, they don’t have power over you. You’ve still got obligations, of course, but it really pisses off the users, and my dear mother is one of those who thinks that is an inherent good. 🙂

One of my Oddities is that I don’t really notice what people look like or how they are dressed, unless it is completely outré. (Took me a half an hour a couple weeks ago to figure out what was different about one of the daughter’s friends – he’d let his hair go monochrome, from electric blue and fire engine red.)

So I do sit in the mall food court every so often. Not for the outré, but for the “ordinary” people, to practice descriptions of them.

Yes, I do have to keep close track of when the wife visits the hairdresser, to maintain domestic tranquility.

I need to go to coffee shops or burger places or similar at least a couple of times every month or I risk the downward spiral of depression. Or movies. Or any place where I can sit down and be surrounded by people. I don’t need to talk with them – beyond what you have to with the salesperson – or otherwise interact with them, and I hardly ever do, just need them to be there.

And the other part – if I don’t do something like that regularly doing it slowly becomes harder. And if I shut myself in my apartment, yep, I start to get depressed. I don’t need much of it, and I do find having to interact with other humans a lot stressful, but it seems I don’t do all that well completely without either.

I made a D in English 112H because my spelling was so poor, and I tried to type my term paper on mainframe computer. I should have rented a typewriter from Kinkos. Serves me right; I bragged to someone on the dorm hall that we’d had the English textbook in high school. The dwarf stud paid me back by nick-naming me Double Aught, as in Jethro Bodeen’s spy name, Nought-Nought.

Whenever I read Darkship I wonder about how close Thena is to our lovely hostess. Some of the things Thena says/does just seem so much like how I imagine Sarah. So if they actually read her stories, I can imagine them thinking that Sarah is exactly like her characters and running off at the mouth (or keyboard).

if I can remember the quote properly, “Mistaking a character’s beliefs and motivations for the author’s is usually the sign of a fool.” That’s probably milder than what had originally been written, but while often graphic, my memory isn’t photographic. On the other hand, there’s nothing that says an author can’t inject a considerable amount of themselves into their characters. I suppose Athena could be a ‘let’s pretend’ version of Sarah as a teenager. Why not? I’ve played a Starship Captain flying the venerable U.S.S. Treehouse as a young boy.

I totally get it about being an introvert who needs to be around people. In fact, I think that I need to be around people precisely because I’m an introvert. I’m not going to seek out society on my own. I need to be able to go to the parks and the libraries and the museums and run into others there. If I end up out in the sticks somewhere, I think I’ll probably just sit in my box and never leave.

I wonder if anybody has ever figured it as really having been a German who she married in Italy. 😀 And are they sure Sarah and Dan really live in USA, and not, for example, in Chile or Canada. Or Australia.

Sure. Dad’s family supposedly originated there 12 centuries ago or so, but you’re not following the bread crumbs.
I was of the village, so they knew I was Portuguese. But I brought back this guy who LOOKS MORE PORTUGUESE THAN I (true) and is supposedly foreign. Oh, must be Italian. (The FIRST rumor was that he was a baker, the next village over. When that was disproved, given that he was foreign, he must be Italian.)

Once, when she was pushing my young son around the base in Germany, someone asked my wife if his father was Mexican. My wife – used to people asking these sorts of questions – simply replied, “No.” The interlocutor then asked, “Are you sure?” My wife took several moments before she could respond, “Yeah, pretty sure.”

(Our son can look like just about anyone who, as our hostess puts it, “tans well”. He has curly hair and a complexion anywhere between olive and brown, depending on his recent time in the sun. I tan pretty well to start with (though with supposedly all non-Mediterranean ancestry… except for the one Cherokee a few generations back), and wife was mistaken for a local in Jamaica, on our honeymoon.)

“to the right of Lenin” which in their minds meant Hitler
Well, Hitler *was* to the right of Lenin. At least a few inches. Maybe even arm’s length. He wasn’t an internationalist, after all. But not even remotely as far as, say GHW Bush (who *was* an internationalist o.O).

Well heck. I seem to have missed almost all of the fun. Hey folks, some of us lurkers are just as hateful to want to leave most everyone ruthlessly alone, too!

Stirring the pot in the fever-mad village of the left isn’t hard. Breath in. Breath out. And suddenly you’re a racist. Or something. The twits of the internets makes it even easier, as it is both eternal* and ephemeral. Stuff lasts as long as it doesn’t get wiped from the server, but can get lost in the layers of crap that cover it over. That last is what most people see first, therefore it must be true. How very… simple. *chuckle*

Marshall McLuhan famously stated that advanced technology was creating a Global Village. (The main technology he had in mind was television) There is some truth in this…but…if we are living in an Electronic Village, then it turns out to have some of the unpleasant characteristics of a *real* village environment.

I wrote about the phenomenon here: Lynchings and Witch-Trials, Technology-Enhanced

I had to nip rumor in the bud once. Went to a dance in another town with a friend. Some other girls we knew also went but got lost Andhra car troubles. We went to rescue them and popped a tire. Couldn’t make it back with five people on a donut so we had to find a hotel for the night and get a new tire in the morning. Called and left a message for my roommate so she wouldn’t worry. Found out Monday that everyone was assuming I’d spent the night with the guy who’d driven me. I told the whole story because it was funny and to clear things up before the garbled version got out of control.

The person who came spinning onto comments here (the village idiot of village idiots, so betwattled as to not even bother getting where the person who started that thread lived or who she is) seemed to think this was our serious plan and was shocked, shocked, after misinterpreting everything we said, that we could talk about genocide.

Oh. Jaynsand. That idiot. Explains why we had the Clamps infestation (using the handle Turner) over at MGC, suddenly bleating about Roma out of the blue.

I like how these fools defend thievery and play as if refusing to obey the law is a good thing, ‘because’ it is a ‘cultural thing, you proles wouldn’t understand’, and we’re supposed to somehow accept that it’s totes okay because (cultural group) does it. (Much in the same way we’re expected to turn a blind eye to child marriages because Islamic ‘minorities’ practice it.)

Filipinos had, culturally, a caste system, complete with a servant/slave caste, and for some tribes, piracy was a game between them. Oh and blood feuds, where I am expected to kill everyone of not just a family, but everyone in their bloodline – relations, kin to the smallest offshoot branch, even by marriage, for reasons that include slander and defamation… By their eyes, I’m supposed to kill them all off because that’s part of my goddamn culture. And that lineal extinction thing is something that still sometimes happens in current era.

Essentially, by refusing to let me cut their throats for the various insults that have been heaped my way, they’re all denying my cultural heritage and rights. And since Filipinos LOVE them cultural appropriation (and that’s gotten even more evident from my last visit there) I can freely adopt aspects of other cultures as I want, and call it MINE.

I like this. *grin* Anyone of Viking heritage here? We can go plunder, burn and pillage as part of a cultural bonding exercise!

Or we’ll just end up doing things like roast whole animals over spits over open fire and charcoal, adding to global warming (snort) and argue about ‘the right way to do it’ because actually, that’s what we’re likely to do. Foooood.

‘sfunny how these advocates of blood & soil cultural acceptance generally sing an entirely different song when it comes to the roots of the Judaic people of the Middle East.

Kind of the same way that ABC had to fire Roseanne Barr, Google had to fire James Damore, Mozilla had to fire Brendan Eich but for the NFL to require employees stand for the National Anthem is a gross violation of Free Speech and just one step shy of sending people to Gulags Concentration Camps.

Yep. And the only time they make ‘use’ of the Judaic example is to say ‘This group is as badly treated as the Jews were, and that is EVIL AND WRONG AND YOU ARE NAZI.’

If cultural excuses is what they use now, I should totes have my cultural excuses similarly valid – like the aforementioned ‘Your bloodline must now become extinct, to it’s tiniest branches and buds and seeds, because of an insult paid to me by one of your kin.’ Do you think they’ll kindly kneel before me, throat exposed, while I tie the headband around my head declaring that I am going to go amok, waiting patiently for my itak to swing down on their necks like so much sugar cane?

(And yes, I’m well aware that the lurkers will take this out of context anyway, pretend I’m serious instead of sarcastic, and say I’m pro-genocide. It’s not the first time Clamps and his ilk have claimed that I am pro-genocide and it won’t be the last.)

Well, not Viking, but at least the Hakkapeliitat seem to have done their part of the plundering and burning and pillaging back in the 30 years war. So, hey, where to? Which part of the world would have good plunder?

It’s morning here, and I was not in the mood to make anything because I live right next to the local Ikea and they do have a very cheap breakfast (just working the weekends for a couple of weeks before my full vacation time starts – I will be back working normally, nights and weekends, by middle of July). But the damn place opens only two hours from now. And that video is making me HUNGRY. 😛

Do we hit libraries and bookstores too, Sarah? Coz we may need to …liberate… an aircraft carrier or three, just to be able to bring it back to your Volcanic Island Base (which we will also set up and fortify, o Sarah, First of Her Name.)

Keep readin’, readin’, readin’
Though they’re disappearin’
Keep them pages readin’
Hardbounds!
Don’t try to understand ’em
Just read and throw and brand ’em
Soon we’ll be living high and wide.
My heart’s calculatin’
My true love will be waitin’
Be waiting at the end of my read.

But what would we demand as ransom? All of Kinokuniya Dubai, or the hostage’s weight in gold and jewels as per standard ransom? (I have it on good authority that Kinokuniya Dubai is so huge, you need a map to find book sections.)

Ivar’s eyes grew huge, and glazed over as he looked at the Enterprise.
“That is a boat?” he asked in an awed voice.
“It is so huge! It is bigger than my entire village! And where are the oars and the sail?”

You better see them fast. When the Muslims take over they will go the way of the Buda’s. The Muslims will have won at Tours and defeated Charles Martel and controlled France since then. Destroy all western culture and replace it with Islam.

I am an American. On top of that, it is an authentic part of my cultural heritage as an American to wildly over identify with the Romans. It is only statistically probable that I had ancestors in the Legions. I am still heir to Rome.

I think Zinn lied. If he did not, that is merely my heritage, nothing to be ashamed of. I find my way using the successes of the path, and will not let guilt get in the way of effective.

I believe America has future. If not, a dying culture often reverts to the successful behavior of the past. My ghost dancing will be that if you are fighting an enemy again, you screwed up and didn’t kill enough the first time. Making peace on any terms but victory is a mistake, no matter the cost. Vae Victis.

I reject the moral authority of culture that is only derived from Christian influence. Christianity alone is authoritative. If it is not proper for my to judge by Christan morality in one thing, I will not be held to judging by Christian morality in any thing. The world has no moral authority, and does not get to pick and choose only what is convenient from Christianity. I know that the idea that all humans are people is not universal.

You have have cultural moral relativism, or you can be effective in persuading me that it is wrong for me to do something.

Take away manufactured panic and they’ve nothing to get panicked about!

Don’t Cry Wolf When It’s Only a Robot
By Sarah Hoyt
Conservatives are becoming less afraid to speak out. This is mostly due to the internet, and to our finding out that we aren’t alone and isolated.

This is also, of course, why the left has redoubled efforts to make us feel alone, isolated and above all crazy.

For years their control of the mass news/entertainment industrial complex (well, it was. Also they hate it when we call it that) labored really hard to make it sound like any right of center opinion — and eventually, those were all the opinions to the right of Lenin – were insane or evil. And those of us who added up the evidence of our eyes and figured we were indeed to the right of Lenin were afraid to speak out, convinced it was just us and madmen out here, on this shaky branch.

As I’m fond of saying (because it too drives the left nuts) the times they are a-changin’. Coming out as not-Marxist is still risky, but it is not precisely career or social suicide.

We are, you could say, an oppressed people on our way to being accepted in the polity. The left still maligns us – even harder, in fact – but the means of communication they control are losing reach and credibility incrementally, and the more they scream and drop the mask of impartiality, the more credibility they lose.

All these stories scare me because I, too, am right-leaning and introverted (plus I’m naturally thin-skinned to boot) and I would really like to be a published author, but the thought of navigating the mess you folks are describing sounds like hell on earth. I try not to be argumentative, but I’m also no good at keeping my beliefs hidden, nor do I really want to be hiding them, frankly. How do you stay sane? I’m not sure I could do it.

As is the idea that they think we’re “plotting genocide” as though we could, you know, put it in action, because we’re… I don’t know? All powerful? Isn’t it weird that the people who say they can ruin/have ruined our careers also think we run the world? Don’t you think they’d get headaches.

Related, and of interest:

Arguably the single most fraudulent claim made by the “never forget” crowd is that once you “dehumanize” a people, it becomes easier to kill them. We saw this idiocy last week in the wake of Trump’s “animals” comment. A thousand never-forgetters crawled out of the woodwork to wail, “Oy, once you compare humans to animals, once you dehumanize them, you make it easy to kill them.” Bullshit. Once you demonize a people, then you make it easy to kill them.

The average human is far more easily moved to murder if he believes he is acting in self-defense against a deviously evil foe.

I wonder what could be slowing the anti-bullying folks in their rush to stand up to that musician who obviously manipulated a woman so he could publicly humiliate her, and incited threats against her for being so foolish as to think he might not be a horrible person?

It’s harder and harder to look at the very sincere and heartfelt condemnation progressives make of the Holocaust and not wonder if the sincerity of how appalled they are by it is only due to the wrong people getting shoved in the ovens. Bullying is probably similar.